2 years ago

Category: Data

It’s 1900, and the cobra population is out of control in Delhi. They stumble upon an obvious, if macabre, answer: pay people for each cobra head they bring to the crown. Everything goes swimmingly for a while: the cobra population is going down and people are getting paid well for facilitating the decline, perhaps too well.

Perverse incentives are everywhere today, and they happen because of a lack of understanding of a problem.

Incident count is one of those metrics: paradoxically you should expect your company’s number of incidents to increase, as you begin to embrace a culture of failure and learning.